Hanna Krall began her career as a prize winning journalist, writing for Zycie Warszawy and Polityka. Since the early eighties she has worked as a freelance writer.
Her widely accliamed books The Subtenant and To Outwit God have been translated into many languages. She was recently nominated for the NIKE prize for her most recent book, An exceptionally long line.

The New York Times:

The Holocaust is a rarely mentioned yet omnipresent force in these stories, even long after the war ends. In ''Portrait With a Bullet in the Jaw,'' Krall revisits Poland with a man called Blatt, who now lives in California. The story tells us how he survived the war there, in hiding, and how others didn't. At the end, he asks: ''Why are there no Jewish graves? Why is no one sad?'' Krall continues: ''Maybe because specters are wandering about. They don't want to leave, since no one mourns for them, since no one weeps for them.''

In ''The Dybbuk,'' Adam S., an American born after the war, is tormented by the spirit of his 6-year-old half brother, who was killed in the Warsaw ghetto. It is not clear whether Krall is inviting the reader to accept the notion that this is a real dybbuk -- a soul inhabiting a living person's body -- or whether she is suggesting Adam S. is suffering from an extreme case of survivor's guilt. The result is the same: the past lives on in the present, and to exorcise it may be misguided -- may, in fact, not be possible.

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Foward Newspaper Online: A Fiction Writer With the Courage To Resist Imagination By Joshua Cohen

The precedents for this type of "journalistic" art writing are there, but faint and far flung; it seems, while reading her immensely strange style, that Krall has invented not only a new and incredibly potent form of expression, but its precursors, too, and their work — indeed an entire genre of historiography performed Marx-style — "from the ground up." Were an accounting to be made, the Borges of the first "Iniquity" stories would be an obvious ancestor; the paragraph-long lives of Danilo Kis's Jews would be another. Also in evidence is Bernard Malamud in his last two stories (the "capsule biographies" of Alma Mahler and Virginia Woolf, in which each fact gets its own line), the Old World fact-finding ramblings of W.G. Sebald and Alexander Kluge, and the slow decay of Walter Benjamin's project in Paris. Still, this illustrious pantheon does not constellate the brilliance that is Krall. There are more of filmmaking's pitiless cuts in her work, more of photography's quieter moments, even hints of the Internet and hypertext, and of course an enormous chorus of the harsh music that made this prose century the century of daily reportage.

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An exceptionally long line, nominated for the NIKE prize 2005.

Marek Radziwon in Gazeta Wyborcza 07-06-2005

This is a book about the inhabitants of a certain 400 year old mansion in Lublin's old town. Among others, this included the family of the famous Lublin doctor Marek Arnsztajn, while the other floors were occupied by other Jewish families. In order to tell the story of their lives, Krall delves into old municipal archives, family memoirs, into whatever remnants which have survived to the present day. But all this documentation is not the most important, because the "exceptionally long line" is not simply a matter of historical reportage. There are many question marks in this book, as well as hypotheses regarding later events, and each hypothesis is possible. That is, each is true.

It's a striking idea - to describe the fate of the now dead inhabitants of one building. Although from the first sentence it is clear, that Hanna Krall is not writing only about them, that she breaks free from the walls of the house, and uses the building o write about the Holocaust. And from the details, from individual stories about the Górniewice, the barber Szam Grajer, the Felhendler family, she reaches the whole.

The holocaust is embedded in "An exceptionally long line" like the outcome of a Greek tragedy. There is no escape from it, not even an attempt at escaping, from the first sentences there is a premonition and expectation. Old Franciszka Arnsztajn enters the Ghetto at her own request, "to be with everybody else". A similar fate meets Józef Czechowicz, though not in the Ghetto, but as the result of blind chance, who was visiting the Arnsztajns. Czechowicz’s life line was exceptionally long, and it was he who said, as if he wanted to trick fate and as if he had a presentiment of something: “nothing bad will happen to me”. And then in the place of a complete description a few dry line suffice: “They said goodbye. He got back to Lublin on the Saturday. He went to get shaved. The air raid began. A bomb fell on the barber’s shop”.

In this novel, although it is about the Holocaust, one can sense a redemptive power, as if Franciszka Arnsztajn was still alive somewhere. As if she hadn’t been murdered in 1942 or 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto. As if all the former residents of the house, who when war broke out lodged in each of the flats with a few other poor families before being taken to the camps, were still alive, albeit in a different place.

Krall sometimes looks ahead into the future and then this book becomes about lost, or rather, suppressed memory. She writes for example about the granddaughter of Franciszka Arnsztajn, who survived the war in the far republics of the Soviet Union. After returning to Poland, she wanted to see an old chandelier, one of the few family items which survived and now had new owners: ‘“Looking at a chandelier doesn’t help anything”, says the new owner. “Why look?”, she repeats harshly, and puts down the phone”’.

Or when she writes about the fate of the building itself: “Many years later, over half a century later, an exclusive bar is located in the basement. No one will live in the building. Companies will : cables, pipes, fibre-optics, alternative sources of energy”.

Or when she writes about the death of Leon Felhendler: “His death was not remembered by the people on stools in the warm evening. Many years later, over half a century later, they assert firmly ‘nobody told us anything about that’”.